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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26591779">In Another Life</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zofiecfield/pseuds/Zofiecfield'>Zofiecfield</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Wynonna Earp (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Being Lost, F/F, Family, Feelings, Home</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 02:33:32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,936</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26591779</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zofiecfield/pseuds/Zofiecfield</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Living their separate lives, Waverly and Nicole know something is missing.  Something is wrong, out of place, but neither can quite put their finger on it.  Both find themselves in the office of a woman they do not know, and find, perhaps, the start of the journey home.</p><p>Chapter 1: Waverly<br/>Chapter 2: Nicole<br/>Interlude: Shorty’s Bar<br/>Chapter 4: Home</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Waverly Earp &amp; Nicole Haught, Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>81</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Waverly</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I think I’m going crazy,” she says, to the woman.  “I hate that word, but still.  I think I’m going crazy.”</p><p>
The woman leans back in her chair, hands folded.  “Tell me more.”
</p><p>“I don’t know my children’s names.  I mean, I do, of course.  I know them like they were learned, memorized, and dutifully kept.  But I should know those names like they are seamless extensions of me.  Yet, when I look at my children, nothing rolls off the tongue.  I have to recall the names, one by one.”
</p><p>
Meeting her gaze, the woman asks, “Do you often forget things?” </p><p>“No.  Not things like grocery lists or dance recitals.  But yes.  All the time, constantly.  Moving from one moment to the next takes conscious effort, like I am physically having to make myself present, like I am actually elsewhere.”
</p><p>“How long have you had that feeling?”</p><p>“Always.  Or at least, for many years now.  Though to think of many years makes my head hurt, in the way staring at a screen strains your eyes.  I try not to think about the past.  Getting this particular moment into focus is hard enough.”</p><p>The woman nods once, as though a suspicion confirmed.  “That sounds exhausting.  Does anything alleviate this feeling of displacement?”</p><p>“Displacement.  That’s the word exactly.  Eerie to hear it spoken, oddly.  I feel displaced.”   </p><p> The woman sits in silence, waiting.</p><p>“I love my children, truly, though I struggle to keep them in my mind and am often startled when reminded of them.  But there are people I love in a different way.  People I would, in a heartbeat, without thinking, give my life for.  People who feel like family should feel.  My heart bursts when I see them.”
</p><p>She hesitates, growing more uncomfortable with her own admissions.  </p><p>“The thing is, I don’t know them.  The librarian.  His name is Jeremy.  I have only spoken with him for moments, checking out books.  But I love him like he is my best friend.  Henry, who drinks at the bar every night.  His eyes are soft and I would trust him with everything, with anything.  And the officer who used to work for Sheriff Nedley, years ago, before he retired?  Nicole Haught?  I love her like we are halves of a whole.  I feel this sickening emptiness when I think of her, like she should be here.  I haven’t seen her in years, to think of her is a gut punch.  Isn’t that crazy?”</p><p>The woman does not answer.  “Do you have any family here, besides your children?”</p><p>“I have a husband, but I don’t know why.”  She pauses for a moment, startled by her own words.  “What an odd thing to say.  But, I can’t think of other words for it.  He is mine, in theory, or so the papers say, but he is not mine.  Never has been and never will be.  I look at him and try to remember him being mine, try to remember how we got here.  But there is nothing meaningful there.  A blur, a slide from high school here.  The details have long since smudged and I cry too often when I squint to read them.  He is not mine.  She is.” </p><p>The woman quirks her head, and a ghost of a smile flickers across her lips.  “Who is?”
</p><p>A long pause, searching.</p><p>“No one.  What a thing to say.” She shifts in her seat, disturbed, but forces herself to continue.  “And I have my sister, but she left and rarely returns.  She is a stranger to me now, though like the other strangers, I know the very heart of her without question.  I think she’s saved me, more than once.  And I feel like I’ve dragged her back from the brink.  But, she left so long ago and there’s nothing I can touch where those memories should be.”</p><p>The woman leans forward now, gaze insistent.  “Tell me, Waverly Earp.  Tell me what you want.”</p><p>“I want things to be different.” </p><p> The woman, unnervingly calm until this point, grows urgent.  “No, no.  You need to say it very clearly, in no uncertain terms.  This is important.  Tell me what you want.  Quickly, now, we’re running out of time now.”
</p><p>“I want a different life, the life I have underneath this one.  I want the one that is missing.”
</p><p> The woman sits back in her chair, satisfied.  “Good.  Go home.  Kiss your children and go to sleep.  Wake up tomorrow and go.”</p><p>“Where?  Go where.”</p><p>“That’s for tomorrow.  We’re out of time.  Goodbye, Waverly Earp.”</p><p>The woman rises and leads her to the door, clicking it shut behind her.  </p><p>Alone in the hall now, she studies the sign on the door.  Dr. Mary Katherine Horony-Cummings, PH.D.  Purgatory Counseling, Inc.</p><p>She can’t quite remember why she was here or how she came to be here.  Only a vague outline, fading as the seconds ticked by.</p><p>
                        <i> Go home.  Kiss your children.  </i>
                      </p><p>So she does.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Nicole</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She is uncomfortable in this room.  She does not want to be here, yet she drove two hours, across five counties, to come.</p><p>“What brought you here today?”  The woman sits tall in her chair, dripping confidence and ease, one leg looped over the other.  Something about the question insinuates she knows the answer already.  It’s unnerving, and somehow, reassuring.</p><p>“I got a flier in the mail, for a free session.”</p><p>The woman waits.  This is not the answer.</p><p>“I am stuck and I don’t know why.”</p><p>Better.  The woman shifts slightly in her chair, expectantly.</p><p>“I am stuck.  I used to live here, in Purgatory.  I came here for a job I was drawn too, though I didn’t know why.  I came here because it felt right.  But it wasn’t right.  It wasn’t right and I left.”</p><p>“What wasn’t right?”  The woman’s gaze is piercing.  “Tell me, what was missing?”</p><p>Missing.  Her discomfort deepens.  Yes, missing is exactly right.  “Them.”  She hesitates to go on but the woman takes no mercy on her.  She relents and continues.  “I was pulled here by family.  They were here, I knew it, surely.  I could feel them here, and as I grew to know the town, I found them.  One by one, I was sure they were mine.  I was sure they knew me, knew my heart as I knew theirs.  But they didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them.”</p><p>The woman asks the simple question with no simple answer.  “Did you try?  To get to know them?”</p><p>She struggles for the words to explain.  “But I <i>did</i> know them.  I knew them then and I know them now.  I dreamt about them, I <i>dream</i> about them, and though the dreams never linger in my memory, I wake knowing them.  But they are living other lives and so am I.  Does that make sense?  No, of course it doesn’t.  I guess that’s why I’m here.”</p><p>“Tell me why you left.”</p><p>“Because I couldn’t stop.  I dreamt about them nightly.  I had the impulse to throw my arms around them, these strangers who aren’t mine.  And she was everywhere.  She was the worst.  She is mine, was mine, was never mine.”</p><p>“Who?  Say her name.  Say it.”</p><p>“Waverly Earp.  We have never spoken.  And somehow, I Iove her.  I would give anything and everything for her.  I would be powerless against her.”  </p><p>She pauses, for a moment, flustered and strained.  She bows her head, scrubbing her face with her hand.  “It’s embarrassing.  I would stop by the bar every day just to see she was okay.  I snuck into the night classes she taught at the community college.  Just to watch her, just to sit at the back of the room and hear her speak.  It was all so familiar, like I had listened to that voice a thousand times in a thousand ways.  I know how she would sigh my name.”  </p><p>Her eyes drift to some empty memory, longing.  “And I knew her children’s names, I knew their faces, and sometimes I forgot they were not mine.  I felt insane all the time.  It was terrifying and I was horribly lonely.”</p><p>“So you left.  And now?”</p><p>“Now is no different than then.  I put space between myself and them.  I moved far from here and far from her.  I tore myself up by the roots, bloodied, and severed all ties.  And nothing changed.  I know her no less.  I miss them no less.  I am no less alone.  They are in one world and I, somehow, am stuck in another.  So it feels, anyway.”</p><p>“Tell me again.  What brought you here?  What do you want?”  The woman leans forward, almost imperceptibly.  </p><p>“I want to be unstuck.”</p><p>“You want to be free of them?  Freed of your ties to this place, to these people?”</p><p>The words hit her with a sickening blow.  She has to hold back the panic that surges, the wave of nausea at the thought.  “No.  No, please.”  She isn’t sure why she is begging now, but the moment demands truth, and so she begs.  “I want to unstick whatever holds me from them.  I want to slip between the planes of this life, peel back the layers and find them.  I want to be theirs.  Hers.  I have waited so long.  Sometimes, longer than I can account for, I think.”</p><p>The woman considers these words for a long moment, then, satisfied, nods.</p><p>“Our time is up.  Go home and sleep well.  Pack only what you need and, when tomorrow comes, go.”</p><p>She might have asked where, but she had been going for so long, the question had ceased to mean much.</p><p>She rises and leaves.  Finds her way, sightless and absent, to the car.  Drives home on instinct only, and crawls into bed.  Lets sleep take her, dreamless for once.</p><p>The flier rests, forgotten, on the kitchen table.  </p><p>Dr. Mary Katherine Horony-Cummings, PH.D.  Purgatory Counseling, Inc.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Interlude: Shorty’s Bar</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There are two salt circles on the worn wood floor of the bar.</p><p>In the first, the two lie, hands entwined.  They are there, but clearly, no longer there.  Death isn’t what cloaks them.  They are not gone, but somehow, absent.  Somehow, elsewhere.</p><p>In the second, the woman sits, unmoving.  Eyes closed, ticking rapidly under lids.  The cards are spread before her, orderly, save for the final two, thrown into the next circle.  Two cards, two bodies, two lost souls.</p><p>Beside the circles, the family waits.  They hover on their knees or squat, low and anxious.  They pace the floorboards and wring hands.  </p><p>The woman’s eyes snap open.  She has arrived.</p><p>They rush to her, all but one, who lingers back.  This one has the most at stake here and her heart has begun to guard against hope.  She would like to kill something, but the killing has already been done, and it didn’t fix this. “Did you find them?”  She asks this from where she stands, unable to bring herself closer.  It is too much. </p><p>The man, older than his years, kneels beside the salt.  “Kate?”</p><p>The woman rises slowly.  “It is in motion.  They are unstuck.”  She seeks out the eyes of the one who stands back.  She cannot reassure, she can make no promises.  “I did all I could.  The rest is up to them.”  </p><p>The one who hangs back swears softly under her breath, but does not break.</p><p>The woman steps carefully out of the circle.  She bends to brush fingers through the salt, breaking the ring.  She collects the cards in a neat pile, save for the two, and stows them in a pocket.</p><p>The woman looks at the pair who remain encircled, dormant.  She lingers on them only a moment.  She has lived long and learned many lessons.  She knows the limits of her skills and she knows when to walk away.  </p><p>She leaves and the family stays.  They wait.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Home</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They wake with no recollection of the day before, of the woman and her wisdom.  They wake and the world is the same, and, though they can’t quite place why, so deeply disappointing.  </p><p>Like the world, they too are unchanged, save for the pull low in the gut, insistent, urgent.  It serves as memory where memory is absent, compelling them to go.</p><p> </p><p>One wakes early and is on the road before dawn.  She prepares for the departure in no way.  The cat, unfed.  The trash bins, unemptied.  The door, unlocked.  She wakes and leaves.<br/>
<br/>
As she drives, the other slips from bed silently.  She creeps across the floors and past open doors.  She does not look in, she does not look back.  No kisses for sleeping cheeks.  In the kitchen, she boils water, catching it just before the kettle screams.  Two mugs, steaming.</p><p>Neither looks closely enough to wonder why.  Neither pauses to reconsider her movements, to doubt the pull that drives them on.  This is a conscious choice, made neatly upon waking and then tucked against the sternum for safe-keeping.  Still for so long, the endless absence of movement, they dive blindly into this new and undefined current.</p><p>One opens the front door and finds the other, sitting on the stoop.  Nervous, and not nearly nervous enough.  Entirely out of place, and yet, somehow, expected. She sits down and passes one of the mugs into waiting hands. They sip quietly, watching the sun rise over the mountains.</p><p>They might have done this a thousand times before.<br/>
<br/>
“I think,” one says, trailing off.<br/>
<br/>
“Yes,” says the other.<br/>
<br/>
They rise and leave on foot, empty handed.</p><p> </p><p>The two walk and, at first, speak not at all.  They have willingly stepped into the unexpected, the unsure, the indeterminate.  They are lost in their thoughts. </p><p>Miles into the journey, or perhaps moments, their shoulders brush.  It is a mere glancing blow, yet it cracks them open.  A single touch, a fissure through which time begins to slip.<br/>
<br/>
They begin to speak of small nothings.  Moments in a day that are insignificant alone, but compiled, form a picture of a life, lived in.  </p><p>They speak, and as they do, their stories drift.  At first, an imperceptible vibration, but soon enough, the stories become unstuck.  Back and forth, they drift between this here and a different now, a different time they had held onto only faintly, a glimmer in the corner of the non-dominant eye, a nagging ache underneath the two last molars.  </p><p>They don’t notice, don’t feel the shifting as they become less and less attached to this particular plane of existence.</p><p>They talk and each moment flows through them with no regard for and no attachment to the next.<br/>
<br/>
And yet.  Each story, each and every insignificant word, loosens the world’s grip on them, shifts them towards a liquid state.  Two women, connected but held apart for too long by a force they can’t hold in their minds long enough to name.  The hard line between one and the other begins to blur.  Their colors begin to bleed into a new shared hue.<br/>
<br/>
Their hands brush.<br/>
<br/>
In the world in which they had woken a day ago, this would have wrung shivers of panic from them, excitement laced too heavily with anxiety. They would have pulled away.<br/>
<br/>
In that world, there would have been no tea, no walk, no shoulders anyway.</p><p>But this is no longer that world, no longer pure.  That world is dissolving around them and the one running underneath it is beginning to show.</p><p>If they feel shy now, reserved or hesitant or unsure, it is only the faint memory of that feeling, readily skimmed from the surface and discarded.<br/>
<br/>
One slips her hand into the other’s for the first and thousandth time. The other gives a reassuring squeeze.<br/>
<br/>
They shed years as they walk, the weight of that time lifting off their bodies.  Seasons change, the landscape crumbles and resurrects, entirely unnoticed.  Perhaps, if they look closely, if they strain to remember, they might noticed the change.  But they do not look.</p><p>The memory of the other rises up in each of them, subtle and sweet, like dawn.  Gradual, and yet, immediate.  These hands, this voice, that smile.  They remember.  They forget they had ever forgotten.<br/>
<br/>
Hand in hand, they walk on.</p><p> </p><p>They arrive, somewhat abruptly, outside Shorty’s Bar.<br/>
<br/>
“I think we’re late,” one says, eyebrows beginning to furrow.<br/>
<br/>
“No,” says the other, reaching to smooth the strain with her thumb. “Right on time.”<br/>
<br/>
They hold there for a long, still moment, gazing into the depths and depths and depths of each other. They are not quite here and certainly no longer quite there. But they are, undeniably, together.<br/>
<br/>
They are not themselves, no version complete. But in that moment, they are, perhaps, more themselves than they have been in a very long time.<br/>
<br/>
They enter the bar.</p><p> </p><p>That was years ago now. </p><p>No one speaks of the days their bodies lay dormant.  No one speaks of the moment they sat up in circles of salt.  Not anymore, anyway.  They had no memory of their time gone, and all questions had been left unsatisfied.</p><p>Some nights they sleep fitfully or far too deeply to be of comfort.  They wake frighteningly empty, their attachments loose and rattling in the darkness.  Unfamiliar names on their lips, unfamiliar laughter in their ears.  A deep gut-wrenching loneliness.</p><p>On those nights, they reach for each other, seeking solace for a loss they can’t name.  They press their foreheads together and hold tight.  In the other’s eyes, the twin loss, the twin loneliness, reflecting back.</p><p>Not a shared memory, but rather, a shared absence of memory of another life. </p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p> </p>
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